[HN Gopher] Timescale raises $110M Series C ___________________________________________________________________ Timescale raises $110M Series C Author : petercooper Score : 152 points Date : 2022-02-22 16:38 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.timescale.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.timescale.com) | riffic wrote: | This company should have a wikipedia article at this point, | right? Where is it? | | closest I can find are these: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TimescaleDB | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:TimescaleDB | LoriP wrote: | Timescale's Community Manager here. Unfortunately that's a | longish story of a strongly opinionated Wikipedia editor. | riffic wrote: | I think I might have bumped into that particular editor | recently, lol. | | Let me know if you want help in putting together a draft, I'm | good at finding sources[0] to establish notability. | | [0] https://www.google.com/search?tbs=bks:1&q="TimescaleDB"+- | wik... | LoriP wrote: | Thank you, I might take you up on that...and exchange | experiences lol | ashvardanian wrote: | Insane! $110M towards yet another Postgres extension. Theoretical | CS and hardware has advanced so much, but the people are using | the same old boring approaches. Truly sad. | pella wrote: | proposal for "Solving PostgreSQL wicked problems" | | https://github.com/orioledb/orioledb/blob/main/orioledb-post... | ashvardanian wrote: | Great report, but I am new B-Trees alone will not enough. The | simplest common solution is to switch to LSM Trees for higher | write throughput. Thats exactly what Yugabute does, by | putting Postgres over RocksDB. Same way as Facebook uses | MyRocks = MySQL + RocksDB. | Beltalowda wrote: | What do you think better alternatives/approaches are? | ashvardanian wrote: | Literally anything. There is so much to do better. Faster | I/O, kernel bypass and async filesystem, new persistent data- | structures, alternative lock-free concurrency resolution | schemes... | | Disclaimer: I am highly biased, as I am | funding/researching/developing a DBMS myself. Out of | necessity though, as we constantly hit bottlenecks in the | persistent I/O layer. We are not selling or offering | anything, but will soon share some fresh internal results on | aforementioned topics. | | In the meantime, here is a list of startups re-implementing | mostly identical ideas: | https://unum.cloud/post/2021-12-31-dbms-startups/ | dboreham wrote: | PostgresSQL process-per-connection execution model is | limiting. | _joel wrote: | True, why use proven technology with decades of production | usage with your data when you can use a novel and theoretical | CS paper implementations. | pella wrote: | "boring" == less transactional surprise :-) | | https://jepsen.io/analyses/postgresql-12.3 | georgewfraser wrote: | I would love to run a time-series benchmark against a good column | store like Snowflake to see if purpose-built time series | databases are actually faster. I have a sneaking suspicion the | time scale databases are just reinventing the column store, and | that an appropriate non-sabotaged benchmark would show this. | ren_engineer wrote: | the main selling point is developer experience I think, rather | than building out a bunch of stuff on top of a more general | purpose tool you use a specialized DB and save time. They also | have some benchmarks against Clickhouse for example | ashvardanian wrote: | I have just looked up those charts on Timescales website [1] | and I am a bit surprised. Never extensively used any of those | DBs, but I have seen their sources and must say that expected | bigger gaps [2]. Also worth looking: the Taxi Rides Benchmark | on Postgres vs Clickhouse [3]. | | [1]: https://www.timescale.com/blog/what-is-clickhouse-how- | does-i... [2]: | https://www.pradeepchhetri.xyz/clickhousevstimescaledb/ [3]: | https://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html | manigandham wrote: | > _" timescale ... are just reinventing the column store"_ | | Not reinventing but reimplementing it for Postgres, which | didn't have serious OLAP capabilities before. Lots of "newsql" | systems are combining OLTP and OLAP by starting at one side and | adding the other. | | So far Timescale has column-oriented compressed storage and | scale-out partitioning, and they're working on matching the | compute part. | abraxas wrote: | There is a lot of value in having a columnar storage that is | fully ANSI SQL and supports all of the goodies that you get in | the Postgres ecosystem. | | NoSQL databases with their half assed SQL grammar | implementations are a real pain to use in real applications | where they often have to be handled differently in code vs the | RDBMS because either their syntax is slightly different or | their connection stack is incompatible. | akulkarni wrote: | (Timescale co-founder / CEO) | | I just want to say that we wouldn't be here without the support, | feedback -- and yes, even the honest critiques -- from the HN | community. So thank you everyone. | | As we like to say, we've come a long way in the past 5 years, but | we're just getting started :-) | | And we're hiring globally for our remote-first team! | | https://www.timescale.com/careers | 999900000999 wrote: | How did you get started? | | I've dealt with databases for a very long time, But I frankly | find SQL extremely hard and I could never imagine forking | postgres to improve it. | | Is this your first company, did you personally write much of | the early code, or did you hire a team to do so. | | As a side note, I'm seeing an insane amount of movement when it | comes to business to business VC funding. | | What about an entertainment product ? | | Hypothetically, if you were given a year off to come up with a | new product, do you think it would be possible? | | I would absolutely love to read a blog post where you discuss | the challenges you've faced getting here. | avthar wrote: | Timescaler here. Linking a few posts below [0][1] that answer | the majority of your very good questions. The posts detail | why and how TimescaleDB started and why the founders chose to | build a time-series database on PostgreSQL. | | [0]: https://www.timescale.com/blog/when-boring-is-awesome- | buildi... [1]: https://www.timescale.com/blog/40-million-to- | help-developers... | 999900000999 wrote: | Thank you ! | | I plan on reading this all in full. | | Edit : Very impressive way to pivot , best of luck ! | sdesol wrote: | Congrats and I was wondering if you can comment on the current | team size? I'm looking at the number of contributors that have | created pull requests within the last four months and it is | shockingly low (in a good way). Based on the following: | | https://oss.gitsense.com/insights/github?q=pull-age%3A%3C%3D... | | It looks like there has only really been 7-10 full time | contributors and for you to have raised what you have with such | a small team is quite impressive. Is development happening | elsewhere or is my hunch correct? | | Edit: Thanks to feedback from mfreed, below is a more accurate | picture of development activity: | | https://oss.gitsense.com/insights/github?p=authors&q=pull-ag... | mfreed wrote: | Hi! So the team is over 100 at this point, but engineering | effort is spread across multiple products at this point. | | The core timescaledb repo [0] currently has 10-15 primary | engineers, with a few others working on DB hyperfunctions and | our function pipelining [1] in a separate extension [2]. I | think generally the set of outside folks who contribute to | low-level database internals in C is just smaller than other | type of projects. | | We also have our promscale product [3], which is our | observability backend powered by SQL & TimescaleDB. | | And then there is Timescale Cloud [4], which is obviously a | large engineering effort, most of which does not happen in | public repos. | | Interested? We're growing the teams aggressively! Fully | remote & global. | | https://www.timescale.com/careers | | -- | | [0] https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb | | [1] https://www.timescale.com/blog/function-pipelines- | building-f... | | [2] https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb-toolkit | | [3] https://github.com/timescale/promscale ; | https://github.com/timescale/tobs | | [4] https://www.timescale.com/blog/announcing-the-new- | timescale-... | sdesol wrote: | Hey thanks for the insights! I've added all timescale repos | for indexing and should have the bigger picture in a few | hours. Thanks again for catering to my curiosity. | pcthrowaway wrote: | As a user of Timescale, one of the things I find most lacking | with Timescale (and postgres also to be honest) is good | educational content on par with MongoDB University; structured | courses that teach you database design concepts from first | principles and then what problems postgres/timescale solve on | top of them. Hands on experience working with datasets and an | interactive way of learning more about the types of things you | can do. | | I realize Timescale and Mongo are very different things, but | when I got professionally started with software 10 years ago, | the MongoDB courses (and the stanford online Intro to DB | course) were immensely helpful. Working with Timescale | professionally now I'm often unsure whether I'm doing things | suboptimally, e.g. making tables hypertables when a regular | table might be better, flexibility and capabilities of indexes | with hypertables, and application-facing tooling. | djk447 wrote: | Totally fair and something that I'm actually forming a team | to work on! We're starting with some very foundational | material [1], that may well be review and it's not as formal | / professional as Mongo University or the like, but I am | going to be continuing this course and then we'll be | iterating more from there. I'd really love some feedback and | also your questions, ie what you want to cover or what you | find confusing. You can leave comments on the video or in our | community Slack channel[2] or forum[3]. Thanks for the | feedback and I hope we'll be able to do some of that for you | over the coming months! | | [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLJm2oStD9w [2]: | timescaledb.slack.com [3]: https://www.timescale.com/forum/ | jabiko wrote: | While I think that TimescaleDB is a great technology, the support | experience of their Timescale Cloud offering was quite | underwhelming. | | In one occurrence we wanted to create a VPC peering between the a | database hosted on Timescale Cloud and our Kubernetes cluster | hosted on Azure. For this you need to put the Azure resource | group name in a form on Timescale cloud. | | Turns out our resource group name contained an uppercase | character and the form on Timescale Cloud has a (broken) | validation that required the name to be all lowercase. We | couldn't easily change that name since that would have required | us to re-create our production AKS/K8S cluster. | | After contacting Timescale support (as a paying customer) the | answer was basically: "Well, we require the resource group name | to be lowercase, we can't change that, sucks to be you, bye" | | We can live without that VPC peering, so we didn't push that | further, but there are zero technical reasons for that | restrictions and I would bet that its just a broken validation | regex in their backend that they are unwilling to fix. | akulkarni wrote: | Hi there, sorry you had a negative experience with Timescale | Cloud. | | It's true that on Azure we require both the resource group name | and also the Virtual Network name to be in lowercase. | | But Microsoft names are case-agnostic, so this should be okay. | | We've had other customers with this issue before and converting | the resource group name to be lowercase worked for them. | | Also, sometimes technical restrictions exist for internal | reasons that are not obvious / hard to share externally. :-) | | That said, I shared your message internally and someone is | looking into this. Stay tuned. More soon. | jabiko wrote: | Hi, thanks you. I'm really grateful for your answer. The | Azure documentation seems to hint at the resource group name | being case insensitive, so I guess that could actually work. | To be honest I don't know if we tried just using a lowercase | version. | | Again, I want to emphasize that I find it really great that | you took the time to answer here. | CyberDildonics wrote: | I don't understand what is difficult or non trivial about these | types of databases and when people try to explain it, it usually | just gets more confusing. Filtering values over time is just the | same operations that you would find in an audio editor or a one | dimensional version of what you find in an image editor (weighted | averages of values). I wonder how many customers could just use | sqlite but don't know anything about computers and end up buying | some sort of subscription to a 'new kind of database'. | | The web page just drops as many buzzwords as possible - web3, | crypto, nfts, monitor soil to fight global warming - it looks | like a disaster to anyone who understands the basics of | programming. | jacobr1 wrote: | If your data is small enough, then sure, any number of well | tested data platforms will work for you. | | The problem something like timescale tries to solve is dealing | with "high cardinality." When you have many unique values the | indexing approaches needed to ensure performance start becoming | different. You'll run into write performance issues if need | indexes on every single column, and every single combination of | columns, and each column has a large number of unique values. | While the common factor many of these datasets tend to share is | that they are being constantly generated by some kind of | sensor/probe/live-system, they tend to have a variety of other | dimensions that are also high-cardinality. | CyberDildonics wrote: | There are two different things here - the first is people not | needing an elaborate solution because computers are fast and | the second is that if someone does need a solution with less | overhead, why is that difficult? | | Values over time like audio is a one dimensional signal. | Seeking is basic data structure stuff, filtering is basic | signal stuff. There aren't going to be other dimensions like | time, which makes the other values just other channels. If | you need to combine dense values they can be not only | filtered, but filtered into individual distributions. | | People give abstract descriptions like you have here, but I'm | just not seeing a difficult problem in all of this. | lopatin wrote: | > I don't understand what is difficult or non trivial about | these types of databases | | Boy were you right about that | beanjuiceII wrote: | promote that person to management | cleancoder0 wrote: | SQLite does not support column based optimizations. Time series | data is insanely compressible. | jtlisi wrote: | Have you read the gorilla TSDB paper? | https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol8/p1816-teller.pdf | | It does a good job laying out why TSDBs are used and some of | the tricks they leverage to store this type of data. See the | requirements for the service layed out in the paper: | | * 2 billion unique time series identified by a string key. | | * 700 million data points (time stamp and value) added per | minute. | | * Store data for 26 hours. | | * More than 40,000 queries per second at peak. | | * Reads succeed in under one millisecond. | | * Support time series with 15 second granularity (4 points per | minute per time series). | | * Two in-memory, not co-located replicas (for disaster recovery | capacity). | | * Always serve reads even when a single server crashes. | | * Ability to quickly scan over all in memory data. | | * Support at least 2x growth per year | | Lots of organizations want to adopt an SRE/devops model and | want a similar system. Also one thing you should know is that | trying to accomplish this with traditional DBMS is usually | possible but since it is not making specifically optimized | trade offs it usually is more expensive and requires a lot of | tuning/expertise. | | Lots of organizations (even legacy companies) have a massive | need for this kind of service. Also there are very cheap | options out there than can handle the million metric use case | for basically a <100$ a month is infra costs. The use case is | definitely there and even if it's possible with traditional | DBMS systems, it usually cheaper and more performant to use a | dedicated TSDB. | [deleted] | ishikawa wrote: | This shows that awareness to time series data is huge today, | unlike 10 years ago. | mfringel wrote: | How does Timescale handle lookup tables? | | That is, "I have this seldomly-updated list of ~10000 things, and | I'm going to need to join it against my time-series data." | | With other time-series databases I've dealt with, it's an | afterthought at best and the answer is typically "Enrich the data | via flink/benthos/etc. on import and avoid using any kind of | join." | | Does Timescale's use of PostgreSQL circumvent this issue, both in | terms of storage of lookup tables, and performance on join? | aeyes wrote: | > Looking ahead, our goal is to keep innovating on top of | PostgreSQL and to continue adding breakthrough capabilities | | Does Timescale contribute back to PostgreSQL or do they truly | only build on top of it? | https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/ only lists two | contributors and they both worked on Postgres before joining | Timescale. | yieldgap wrote: | On Twitter, they said they're building a team for upstream | contributions | https://twitter.com/acoustik/status/1496145349735559168?t=HG... | tkinom wrote: | I have written time series logging db with sqlite believe that | approach has following advantages: System | performance scales well with latest SSD HW. As compare | to cloud base approach that is limited by network/cloud speed. | One can store logs per day / week / year in separate db files as | needed. Backup of small db files for last few | days/weeks are trivial with rsync. | | Love to hear other pro/con arguments from folks who use Timescale | type approach. | fabioyy wrote: | i'm using timescale to store sensor/gps log ( 50 inserts/s - 24/7 | ). after 2 months still very good ) | hardwaresofton wrote: | Have you written about this anywhere? I'm sure TimescaleDB | would love to signal boost that post, and I separately would | love to read about how you have it set up and the nitty gritty | of the setup. | | How are you dealing with backups/WAL and general DB | administration? Are you using Timescale Cloud? | mparnisari wrote: | Wonder if Timescale would be a good answer to | https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70841804/is-aws-timestre... | akulkarni wrote: | In our benchmarks (which you and others are welcome to | replicate), Timescale vastly outperformed AWS Timestream: | | https://www.timescale.com/blog/timescaledb-vs-amazon-timestr... | mfreed wrote: | To replicate, please see the Time Series Benchmark Suite, | which is open-source and has many vendor-contributed | configurations: | | - https://github.com/timescale/tsbs | | - https://github.com/timescale/tsbs/blob/master/docs/timestre | a... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-02-22 23:00 UTC)